Freedom: Life in the Spirit - Faith You Can See
By Dr. Tom Pace
Sunday, November 12, 2017
Galatians 5:6, 13-15, 5:26-6:3
We’re going to continue our sermon series called “Life in the Spirit” and we’re looking at the fifth and six chapters of Galatians.
What does it mean to live with the Holy Spirit in our lives? Today we’re going to look at a number of independent verses that focus on love, the mark of the Spirit in our lives. Reading our Scripture today is Stephanie Wilkins. Stephanie is a pastoral intern from Perkins School of Theology who has been assigned to St. Luke’s through May. She is teaching us many things and learning many things, and we’re so glad to have her with us as she studies for ministry.
Listen now as we hear the Scripture read. Listen with your heart, as well as your ears.
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love. Galatians 5:6 (NRSV)
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Galatians 5:13-15 (NRSV)
Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another. My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. Galatians 5:26 – 6:3 (NRSV)
Join me in prayer: O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I had a sister who was six years older than I was. She passed away a number of years ago. But when I was about 8, 9 or 10 years old, and she was a teenager, I learned many things from her. Some of them were good things and others were “iffy.” She used to have these girlfriends come over to the house for slumber parties. They would turn the lights down low and they would have séances. You remember those? They’d have a Ouija board; you remember those? You know, this is one of those stories that I use because you baby boomers remember Ouija boards.
They were these square boards that had letters all around them, and with the letters “yes” and “no” and fortune teller pictures and stuff. You’d put this wooden pointer that was pretty big and it had felt underneath it, so it would slide on the board. Everybody that was there would put their fingers on the pointer.
Now you’d have to know my sister who was the drama queen of the world. She’d say, “Can you feel the spirit that is here now? Spirit, are you with us?” Then she’d slowly ease the pointer over so it pointed to “yes.” She’d say then, “The spirit is here! Did you see that?” Then they’d ask the spirit all sorts of things. She’d say, “The spirit of the departed will tell us who will invite Sally to prom!” Then it would go spell out “nobody.” It was all such baloney, but I guess it was harmless and fun at that age.
The charlatans have been using magic tricks to convince people that somehow the spirit of the departed is present. The magnet under the table that moves the vase across the table, or the door that magically opens. They’ll say, “They’ve come into the room!” There’s a kernel of truth in all of that. The kernel of truth is that you can tell if something unseen is present if it leads to something that is seen. That was the premise they worked for.
How do you know if the Holy Spirit is active in your life - if you’ve been filled with the Spirit? We’ve called this sermon series “Life in the Spirit” but how do you know if you’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit? Is it a feeling you have? Can you say “I feel it. I feel the Holy Spirit.” Then it’s pretty much the same if the Astros win the World Series and you’re just thrilled inside and you have this feeling of joy. So you’ve been filled with the Spirit.
What the Scripture says is that there are fruit of the Spirit and the number one fruit of the Spirit is love. In fact, many scholars believe that everything after love is simply a description of the things that go with love. That you have to understand in ancient Greek, in koine or Biblical Greek, there’s no punctuation. So it could be that there’s a colon after the word “love.” It says, “The fruit of the spirit is love” then joy, peace, kindness, etc. Love is the primary mark, the activity of the presence of God in our lives. That’s what love is.
So you heard Julie share with us earlier that the mission statement of St. Luke’s is “We are one family in Jesus putting faith to work in love.” And that comes right out of the Scripture we read this morning – Gal. 5:6. ^“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything…. “
Anytime you read “the only thing that counts” in Scripture – pay attention. It sounds important. “... the only thing that counts is faith workingthrough love.”
The word “working” is translated all different ways. If you have the New International Version it translates as “faith expressed in love.” The older versions sometimes translated it “faith enacted in love.” The word is energeo; it’s Greek word from which we derive the English word energy. It means to put into action, to make something happen with it. To move it. Faith working is a good word – it means we’re putting it into action. And the way we put it into action is love. So love is the mark of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, it’s the mark of faith.
How do I know if my faith is real true faith? Is it just that when I was 16 years old I said, “Lord, I profess you as Lord and Savior of my life” and that’s it? Or the way we know if our faith is real is to ask “Does it produce the actions of love?” It is the mark of the Spirit.
The author of I John says this: “No one has ever seen God but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” You can’t see God - that’s the unseen part. Faith is something that’s unseen. The part you can see is the activity of love.
Have you ever done the fun science thing… we do it with kids and I kind of like it myself, where you take a two liter bottle of Coke and a Mentos tablet? Have you ever done that? Go out in the back yard and do that. You take a two liter thing of Coke – Coke Zero works best – and you poke a hole in the top. Then you unscrew it and you drop in a little Mentos tablet – you know the little mints. Then screw the lid on tight and quickly and “Pshooo!” it sends a fountain up into the air. How’d you like that sound effect – that was good? It goes way up into the air. It’s so awesome.
And here’s what I’ve learned. It must be true because I read it on the Internet. It’s that the CO2, because in Coke they fill it with CO2 to make it fizz, and the CO2 is attracted to bumps and ridges. I thought it was a chemical thing but it’s not, it’s a physical reaction. The CO2 is attracted to those little ridges and as soon as they hit a ridge they turn into a bubble. It feels like that Mentos is smooth but it’s been sprayed with a sugar stuff that makes millions of little tiny ridges on it. So as soon as it goes in there all of the CO2 rushes to those ridges and that’s what creates this incredible explosion of bubbles.
You can’t see the CO2 go to the ridges. All you can see is the outcome of it. You can’t see faith. All you can see is the outcome of that faith, which is love. If you see the fruit of love you can count on there being a Holy Spirit tree somewhere. If you see love in action, you can say, “It must grow from faith in someone’s life.”
Now you say to me, “Hey, pastor, I don’t know if that’s true. I saw during Hurricane Harvey people of all sorts of different faiths, and some with no faith at all, and they were loving. And they loved actively in incredibly sacrificial ways.
Yes, that’s true. Because love is the expression, the activity, of the presence of God in our lives, every one of us. Every one of you believers and non-believers alike, all of us are created in the image of God. We are shaped into the character of God. Sin has distorted that, but it’s always still there. Right there at the core of who we are. And so, yes, of course we love. We were made in God’s image.
But if you are filled with the Holy Spirit… I always like the image of a hot water heater lighting – the pilot light lighting the burners and you can see the “whoosh.” And when there’s the filling of the Holy Spirit all of a sudden the power of that love is just made evident all the more. You want to know if your faith is real. Are you loving any more than you were before?
So that ought to make it easy for us to determine, “Do you have faith? Are you filled with the Spirit?” Here’s the problem: the problem is that even love is difficult to define. We don’t know exactly what love looks like. You can’t just say, “I’m going to create this definition of love.” Paul says that the summary of the law is in that one verse: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
How do you describe love? Well, I would tell you that all through the New Testament, Paul – particularly Paul, and Jesus as well – continues to try and say, “This is what love looks like. This is how you’ll know if it’s love. This is what love looks like. It’s not a feeling, it’s not something you feel. It’s an action, it’s something you do.”
What I’d like to do is to just look at this passage that we read here in Galatians, since that’s what’s we’re studying, and look at all the ways love is described. First, in Galatians 5:13: ^“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence,but through love become slaves to one another.”
First of all, love is free, a free choice. You cannot be made to love. That’s how we know it’s not an emotion. Emotions can happen to us. I don’t choose to get angry. I may choose to stay angry; I have to learn how to deal with my anger. I have to decide how I’m going to put that anger into action, whether I’m going to behave based out of that anger. But emotions are neither right nor wrong, they just are. The question is, “What am I going to do with it?” where there’s a moral imperative involved. He says that it’s a free choice, an action, something you choose. That’s why sometimes my kids will be complaining about their jobs. I have a “Dad answer” that annoys the fire out of them. It is, “Well, you know, that’s why they call it work,” I say, otherwise they’d say, “Are you going to fun this morning?” No, we don’t say that. No, we say, “Are you going to work this morning?” It’s not supposed to be fun.
That’s an annoying answer, but the point is that love is not something that necessarily feels good, it’s something you do.
One of the key concepts of the Christian faith is that Jesus chose to go to the cross. It isn’t that these people conspired against him, arrested him, and put him on a cross without his choice. Yes, we killed him, but in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus made a decision – “I will go. Not what I will, but what you will.” It’s a choice.
Second, it’s a choice of servanthood. It’s a choice to serve. So he says, “Make yourselves slaves to one another.” Now that word slave is doulos, which carries a couple of meanings. One is the meaning to serve. Love is about serving one another.
I have had the privilege – and I think it’s really a privilege – of being with, as all of our pastors have, families who are dealing with chronic debilitating illnesses. And illnesses in which over times, maybe weeks, and months and years, there’s deterioration. Soon people aren’t able to care for themselves. There might be dementia that begins to take over. Sometimes the people are cooperative and sometimes they’re not so cooperative. As they get older and as that disease begins to advance, there’s a part of you that says, “Come on, God, just take them, will you?” Then you think to yourself, “Where is God in this that someone is just suffering?”
Here’s my answer. I see God in those people that are around that person, loving them, caring for them, week after week, month after month, year after year. Tirelessly, persistently loving. In fact, it may be the best expression of love we see. That’s where God is present. That’s servanthood.
Now beyond that, this term doulos implies submission that we don’t only just serve others but we in fact submit to them. The word slave here implies that we no longer own ourselves. That’s a hard one for us. We might say, “Okay, I’ll serve but I’m in charge of me.”
Earlier in Galatians Paul says, “We are to be slaves to Christ Jesus.” You might say, “Okay, I can handle that, but I’m not going to be a slave to these people.”
No, the truth is that we’re in covenant community together. We’re in a covenant; we’re connected to each other. So whether you’re in a marriage, or a family, or a church or a workplace, or a city or a neighborhood, or a country, you are in a covenant with others. And when you are in that covenant you do not belong to yourself. You have responsibilities and your behavior will impact other people, so you can’t just do whatever you want to do. You submit.
We were at a banquet event this week, and sitting around the table with some other pastors and spouses and two of the guys were on their phones having a conversation across the table about when they were going to play golf together. They’re saying, “How about this date?” The other would say, “No, I can’t do that date, how about this one?” The other replied, “No, I can’t do that date…” Finally one guy said, “What about the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.” Then he looked over at his wife sitting right there. “I’m going to have to ask the boss about the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.” And his wife was saying, “No, you can’t play golf that day.”
Now we kind of laugh about that, but the truth is that that’s what it means to be married. You do have responsibilities to each other and you submit to one another. It says in the book of Romans: “Submit yourselves to one another out of reverence to Christ.” We belong to one another. That’s love. It’s not just thinking, “I’m going to do whatever I want to do.”
Paul then goes on to say in the end of chapter five: “Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.” Then later Paul says, “For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.” So what he’s talking about here is that love has humility, love is being humble.
There is a gate at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It’s called “The Gate of Humility.” You know why they call it that? Here’s a hint: They also call it the “Children’s Gate.” Why do they call it that? Because it’s only that tall. And the only way you go through the “Gate of Humility” is to bow. You bow down and go through the gate. You humble yourself.
Now what is the activity that goes with humbling? I’m going to make a sharp right turn – bear with me. I love Jose Altuve. How about that? See, all you have to do is to mention the guy’s name and everyone … gratuitous - is if you feel like you’re losing the crowd just mention the Astros in some way and you get them back again. It’s just that simple. People are dozing off, and you say, “Jose Altuve!” I’ll just mention that and it works great.
On Thursday he will be awarded the Most Valuable Player at 5 p.m. They’ll say Jose Altuve is the Most Valuable Player in Major League Baseball. And I don’t know if you saw the interview with him a few weeks ago when they were talking about it, but they asked him, “What do you think about being the Most Valuable Player?” And he said, “I think it should go to Aaron Judge. He is so strong.”
Now that may be just PR, or it may be false humility, but I don’t think so. He seems like a really authentic guy to me. But here’s what I want you to see. Humility is not degrading yourself, debasing yourself, humility is recognizing that you are secure enough; you stand on a foundation of being loved by God enough, that you can lift others up. You don’t have to worry about lifting yourself up, you stand there and you’re firm enough in that place that you can get under others and lift them up. To advocate for others is the activity of love in humility.
Paul goes on, and says, “My friends,if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.”
So love is restoration, it’s having that hard conversation with someone.
Sometimes a family will have to make a decision to have a teenager taken against their will to a treatment facility. Usually they’re out west somewhere, in a school or someplace because they’re in a place where they’re not doing well and this is the only kind of intervention. They’ve tried other things. It’s a hard decision. Incredibly hard. But, friends, that’s the hard work of love. It’s making that difficult decision.
The hard work of love is taking to a friend with whom you have a strained relationship when it might be easier to just move on to a different friendship. But instead you’re going to work at this one.
The hard work of love is talking to the colleague who has been slacking off, something like “You know what? This is the level of excellence that we function together here in this place. So come on, let’s go.”
Notice, it’s not judging. The word is “restoring” – it’s about putting us back into a right relationship with each other.
One more, and that is this: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfillthe law of Christ.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Sutherland Springs this week as many of you have. You’ve seen the details and the people, and to think that while we were here worshipping here last week, it was happening there. It’s hard, and my heart has broken mostly for the pastor because he wasn’t there and I can just identify with what I would feel like if something had happened here with me traveling and not being there. He lost his daughter, but also many in the congregation, the people he loved.
Now my heartbreak for him doesn’t do anything to help him. We’ve written letters and notes to say the people of St. Luke’s are caring for you, we love you; we’re thinking of you, we’re praying for you. It doesn’t really help him. But the Scripture calls us to come underneath it and carry the burden with him. It doesn’t say that we take the burden from them and carry it on their behalf. We can’t. I can’t take that burden from him – from them, from any of those people. But I can bear it along with them. It may not make it any less heavy for them, but because I love, we carry that together. All of these are just descriptors of love. You can find dozens more as you read and you’ll begin to think, “Ah – that’s love.”
Let me close with this. It used to be that we could get toys that were dangerous. Now you can’t get toys that are dangerous. It’s not appropriate. Anything that has a sharp edge or has anything that could be swallowed, or maybe with a cord. But when I was a kid I had a wood burning set. You remember those? You could tattoo your brother with a wood burning set. We had great fun with the wood burning set. I’d say, “Larry, come over here closer...” Szzt! And smell the flesh.
I also had a chemistry set. You remember those? You’d open them up and there were chemicals on either side. You could go down to the drug store and get more chemicals. In the middle was paraphernalia like a Bunsen burner for an 8 year old with a torch and a flame. Those were great toys and I loved them!
I had litmus paper – do you remember that? It’s still around and you’d dip it into a solution and it turned pink if it was an acid and if it turned blue it was a base. Now this idea of litmus paper - we still use the term today “The litmus test.” The litmus test for faith, for the Holy Spirit in your life, for God’s presence, is love. And the way you get that litmus paper to change is not to paint it. You don’t work harder at love. The way you get that litmus paper to change is to focus on faith. To focus on your relationship with Christ. To bask in God’s love for you. To receive that love so you’ll have it to give. To allow yourself, to encourage God to fill you with the Holy Spirit, to fill that love tank in you so that you have it to pour out to others. And if you do that then your love will shoot out like a Mentos/Coke cannon. Just bubbling over and the whole world will see it.
Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your love for us. Make it so real for us. Fill us with your Spirit; pour over us with how much you love us so that we’ll have that love to share with others. Even when it’s hard. In the name of Christ. Amen.